To back up your entire system so that you can restore the whole system from scratch to protect from a hardware failure like a disk, you need to purchase a software product that can create the backup and then restore it to disk. XP does not have that functionality. With XP all you can do is backup and restore your â€œDataâ€ so that when you reload your system from the XP Install disk, you can restore your data from that backup. Also for a Data Only backup you need to have all of your software installation disks available to reload.

There are several products out there that you can use. You also will need an external USB disk storage drive to contain the backup image to restore from. An example of a external USB disk drive that has the required backup and restore software included can be found at this web page: http://www.maxtor.com/en/hard-drive-bac ... -plus.html . I have used this device successfully for a few people and it is quite straight forward and reasonably priced.

I noticed that the reply from rrathke suggested Acronis software. Should you want to explore that possibility, you might find the best deal at http://www.usergroupstore.com. Gene Barlow (gene@ugr.com) made a presentation a few years ago at an HHICC monthly meeting and has seen fit to include the Acronis software on his storefront web site. He also provides a lot of helpful material on backup strategies and plans that could be very helpful. I, personally, use a competing product which works great for me but I'm a computer geek. The Acronis is easier for the average user and disk imaging is, far and away, the best way to go in backups!

Latest update about the User Group Store. Gene says he is having some DNS problems with the new website name, http://www.usergroupstore.com. He recommends using the previous name, http://www.ugr.com. If you do decide to purchase, you will need to enter our User Group Name (Hilton Head Island Computer Club) and the "Current Order Code" UGSEP08.